evening. She and her son were a loving pair, and it is pleasant to know that although she died on April 9, 1871, before he finally emerged from his difficulties, her end was brightened by the first rays of his coming glory.
Mr. Edison tells us that his son never had any boyhood in the ordinary sense, his early playthings being steam-engines and the mechanical powers. But it is like enough that he trapped a wood-chuck now and then, or caught a white-fish with the rest.
He was greedy of knowledge, and by the age of ten had read the Penny Encyclopædia; Hume's History of England; D'Aubigné's History of the Reformation; Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Sears' History of the World. His father, we are told, encouraged his love of study by making him a small present for every book he read.
At the age of twelve he became a train-boy, or vendor of candy, fruit, and journals to the passengers on the Grand Trunk Railway, between Port Huron and Detroit. The post enabled him to sleep at home, and to extend his reading by the public library at Detroit. Like the boy Ampère, he proposed, it is said, to master the whole collection, shelf by shelf, and worked his way through fifteen feet of the bottom one before he began to select his fare.
Even the Principia of Newton never daunted him; and if he did not understand the problems which have puzzled some of the greatest minds, he read them religiously, and pressed on. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Ure's Dictionary of Chemistry, did not come amiss; but in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and The Toilers of the Sea he found a treasure after his own heart. Like Ampère, too, he was noted for a memory which retained many of the facts thus
